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Sotomayor Faces Big Workload Of Complex Cases

New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak talked to Professor Joseph Grundfest about the decisions that lie ahead for Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Liptak reports:

Now comes the hard part.

With the Senate’s approval of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court on Thursday, the new justice will soon take on one of the most demanding jobs in the land.

Just over a month from now, Justice Sotomayor will hear her first case, one that may transform how elections are financed, at a special summer session of the court. A few weeks later, she will join her eight new colleagues to decide which of the hundreds of appeals that have piled up over the summer the court should hear.

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“The Supreme Court,” said Joseph A. Grundfest, a law professor at Stanford, “will likely issue important decisions defining the permissible level of punitive damages, the validity of business method patents, whether and when parallel conduct among competitors violates the antitrust laws, and statutes of limitations in securities fraud action. But who the heck knows how Justice Sotomayor will vote in any of these cases?”